Note that to avoid unnecessary failovers, it may make sense to increase the value
for the startup option --agents.agency.supervision-grace-period to a value
beyond 30 seconds.

Note: When you restart the Starter, it remembers the original --starter.local flag.

Multiple Machines

If you want to start an Active Failover setup using the Starter, you need to copy the
secret file to every machine and use the --starter.mode=activefailover option of the
Starter. A 3 “machine” Agency is started as well as 3 single servers,
that perform asynchronous replication and failover:

Note that to avoid unnecessary failovers, it may make sense to increase the value
for the startup option --agents.agency.supervision-grace-period to a value
beyond 30 seconds.

Run the above command on machine A, B & C.

Once all the processes started by the Starter are up and running, and joined the
Active Failover setup (this may take a while depending on your system), the Starter will inform
you where to connect the Active Failover from a Browser, shell or your program.

For a full list of options of the Starter please refer to this
section.

Using the ArangoDB Starter in Docker

The Starter can also be used to launch an Active Failover setup based on Docker
containers. To do this, you can use the normal Docker arguments, combined with
--starter.mode=activefailover:

Note that to avoid unnecessary failovers, it may make sense to increase the value
for the startup option --agents.agency.supervision-grace-period to a value
beyond 30 seconds.

The Starter will decide on which 2 machines to run a single server instance.
To override this decision (only valid while bootstrapping), add a
--cluster.start-single=false to the machine where the single server
instance should not be started.

If you use an ArangoDB version of 3.4 or above and use the Enterprise
Edition Docker image, you have to set the license key in an environment
variable by adding this option to the above docker command:

Then replace <thekey> above with the actual license key. The start
will then hand on the license key to the Docker containers it launches
for ArangoDB.

TLS verified Docker services

Oftentimes, one needs to harden Docker services using client certificate
and TLS verification. The Docker API allows subsequently only certified access.
As the ArangoDB starter starts the ArangoDB cluster instances using this Docker API,
it is mandatory that the ArangoDB starter is deployed with the proper certificates
handed to it, so that the above command is modified as follows:

Note that the environment variables DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY and DOCKER_CERT_PATH
as well as the additional mountpoint containing the certificate have been added above.
directory. The assignment of DOCKER_CERT_PATH is optional, in which case it
is mandatory that the certificates are stored in $HOME/.docker. So
the command would then be as follows